By Sean Malloy
Palestinian academic, Dr Ilham Abu Ghazaleh, toured Australia recently for the United Church, speaking on a range of issues relating to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by Israel. A linguistics professor at Jerusalem's Birzeit university, Abu Ghazaleh spoke at a public meeting on July 14, in Sydney, on Palestinian children under the occupation.
"We see that children have been the most affected by the military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza", said Abu Ghazaleh. She explained that the Zionist imposition of the state of Israel in 1948 created three general entities of Palestinian people: those who remained in Gaza and the West Bank and became occupied in 1967, those who became refugees in neighbouring countries and those who are living in exile.
Children who live in the Occupied Territories suffer the most, she said. The occupation places enormous pressures on families who have to spend days and weeks at a time cooped up in their homes during curfews, with little resources and with a fear of Israeli forces destroying their homes.
"There are no recreational facilities for children, there are no play grounds for children, there are no parks for children", says Abu Ghazaleh. "Whenever children want to have some freedom outside the walls of the house the street is the only place to go."
She explained that Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets become targets for children to throw stones at "because the soldier is the figure of the harshest oppression that any human being could come to". The soldiers in return "fire live bullets, and a lot of children are killed. Or they fire metal bullets covered with rubber into the children. There are hundreds and hundreds of children that are handicapped, either from live fire or from rubber bullets. They also throw tear gas bombs which are poisonous." The Israeli army uses deadly CS and CN tear gasses. These weapons cause headaches, uncontrollable coughing and sneezing, burning of the eyes (which can lead to blindness), respiratory difficulties (which can lead to death), nausea, welts and burns on the skin.
"There are thousands of children who are in prison", Abu Ghazaleh stressed. She was unable to give exact figures because the Israeli government forbade her to leave or return with any form of written material. In 1989 5000 Palestinians under 18 years old were imprisoned by Israel. While arbitrary arrests and detention of young people continue obtaining accurate statistics for publication is extremely difficult under the occupation. The Palestinian Human Rights Centre takes five to six weeks just to gather statistics on killings in the territories.
Abu Ghazaleh discussed the importance of education for Palestinians. "Education has been a very important factor in the survival of Palestinians. In 1948 when Palestinians found themselves without their , their land, they had to adopt education for survival. Palestinians have the highest level of education of any society."
The Israeli regime also saw education as an important part of Palestinian identity and have been using school and university closures as a form of collective punishment. Prolonged closures of educational institutions have made it extremely difficult for Palestinian children and youth to receive a decent education.
Aiming to offset the detrimental effects of the occupation on children Abu Ghazaleh said that groups of Palestinians in the occupied territories are organising recreation and education for children themselves.
"We have been trying for the past few years, for example, to organise summer camps for some children, where they can play or do things that they cannot do at home or on the streets."
"We are trying to create some kind of free atmosphere for them. Whereby they can come and play or do some activities. People from all over the world have been coming to help us do this, from Berkeley [in the United States], Italy, France, Amsterdam, from all over the world.
"We have also been trying to set up some sort of playground, whereby children can play instead of going to the streets. For example if we have a group of houses in a certain area we try to find a space inside these houses to plant some grass and perhaps have some games that children can play with. We plan it so that each day one of the neighbours will be responsible for the children in that area. The group in that area will plan activities like dancing, miming, story telling; activities that children don't get anywhere else.
In March 1988 the Unified National Command of the intifada organised a number of Palestinian committees to replace the social infrastructure withdrawn by Israel. One form of committees are the Popular Education Committees, which organise community based education for young people.
Abu Ghazaleh also explained that a cultural gap also needs to be filled for Palestinian children under the occupation. "We have found out that our children have no stories. So we started to write stories for children. There were no songs for children. There are of course Palestinian songs but these songs have never been recorded or distributed so we started to collect these songs, record them and distribute them to the children."
One of the greatest fears that Abu Ghazaleh expressed was of the psychological effects of the occupation, particularly the violence, on Palestinian children.
"Children are living in this repressive atmosphere, where soldiers are here daily with their weapons, bullets and tear gas bombs. We are really afraid for our children who have seen nothing except the life of our people under occupation. We are really frightened that when we have our state these children will turn out to be oppressive hat they have seen in their lives.
"I was talking to a child of eight years old. He was describing to me how a group of three men he thought were Palestinians, were walking in front of him when one of them took a pistol and shot a Palestinian on the street. He was telling me in an ordinary fashion. I said 'how do you feel' he said, 'sad', ordinarily."
"What kind of a child is this who already has rationalised about death in front of him, whose emotions have been taken away from him?"
"We are talking about a group of people who see nothing but soldiers, nothing but death in front of them, nothing except oppression."